Outsourcing labour to the cloud

Various forms of open sourcing to the online population are establishing themselves as cheap, effective methods of getting work done. These have revolutionised the traditional methods for innovation and have contributed to the enrichment of the concept of 'open innovation'. To date, the literature concerning this emerging topic has been spread across a diverse number of media, disciplines and academic journals. This paper attempts for the first time to survey the emerging phenomenon of open outsourcing of work to the internet using 'cloud computing'. The paper describes the volunteer origins and recent commercialisation of this business service. It then surveys the current platforms, applications and academic literature. Based on this, a generic classification for crowdsourcing tasks and a number of performance metrics are proposed. After discussing strengths and limitations, the paper concludes with an agenda for academic research in this new area

AHP-based Adaptive Resource Selection for Cognitive Platform in Cloud Gaming Service

Cloud gaming service enables offloading heavy video-processing tasks up to the cloud server so that simple computers or mobile devices can be eligible to run sophisticated games, but on the expense of high network communications. In this regard, the adequate network utilization must be realized for delivering good gaming experiences to the game players. This necessitates a cognitive platform, which is capable of modifying its multimedia quality requirement in response to the network constraint, and notifying the cloud gaming server for updating the corresponded workload. In this regard, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been proposed to deploy at the cognitive platform for cloud gaming service to select an optimal resource allocation strategy that satisfies various multimedia requirements and energy-awareness. Experiment results can confirm that the proposed method is flexible to enhance the capability of cloud gaming service in term of more efficient cloud gaming resource utilization, particularly during heavy-congested periods, while players’ quality of gaming experience can be still maintained under the mandate of intelligent agent on the player devices

Pokemon Go: A Study on Fit in Virtual-Reality Integration

Augmented reality has become a trend today. The effects of Pokémon Go, the most popular smart phone game recently, on medicine and tourism have been explored in many studies. However, few studies on the cognition and the consistence between emotions and the integration of virtuality (the Pokémon projected in the game) and reality (information quality) have been done. With the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model as the framework, this study aims to explore the fit (cognitive/emotional) and reactions (user satisfaction) of the user in the virtuality-reality integration. According to the findings of this study, information quality and virtual features have significant influence on cognitive and emotional fit and emotional fit has significant influence on user satisfaction; however, cognitive fit doesn’t have significant influence on user satisfaction. It has been found that the user pays much attention to his/her feelings when playing games. Therefore, we should get acquainted with the types and emotions of game players in addition to maintaining the quality of games

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN